Hearing the Call of the Small Aleph

When the Book of Leviticus opens, it does so with a single word that could easily go unnoticed: Vayikra וַיִּקְרָא – “He called.” Hardly the sort of word that makes fireworks explode in the reader’s imagination. Yet hidden in that one Hebrew verb is an entire theology of history, identity, and destiny.

Open a Torah scroll and you’ll see that the last letter of Vayikra – the aleph (א) – is written unusually small. That miniature letter, dangling at the edge of the parchment, has puzzled and fascinated readers for centuries. Why did the scribes shrink it? Did someone’s quill slip? The rabbis assure us it was intentional. They tell us that Moses, out of humility, wanted to write Vayikar וַיִּקָּר – “He happened upon.” He felt too unworthy to claim that G-d had “called” him personally. G-d insisted otherwise. The compromise was a small aleph, humility written into revelation. And that, dear reader, is where the entire spiritual adventure begins.

In Hebrew, the difference between Vayikra וַיִּקְרָא (“He called”) and Vayikar וַיִּקָּר (“He happened upon”) is one tiny letter, yet it separates meaning from accident, destiny from chance. To Moses, G-d calls; to Balaam, the mercenary prophet, G-d merely appears. One lives by vocation, the other by coincidence. In English we have a related word: vocation, from the Latin vocare, “to call.” Before it was hijacked by career counsellors and job boards, it meant precisely what Leviticus means – a divine summons to partnership. Life is not random existence; it is response. The modern world, of course, finds this embarrassing. We prefer careers to callings and options to obedience. We build apps to choose our lunch, then wonder why we cannot choose our purpose. Yet the Bible dares to whisper that history itself is not a collision of atoms but a conversation between G-d and humanity. Every “coincidence” might in fact be an invitation.

The small aleph of Vayikra is more than calligraphic curiosity; it is theology in miniature. It teaches that divine encounter does not inflate the ego, it humbles it. The voice that called Moses out of the Tent of Meeting was not a thunderclap but, as Elijah later learned, a still small voice. C. S. Lewis once joked that humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less. The Torah got there first. The small aleph is that very posture – the lowering of self so that the whisper of G-d can be heard. And if we’re honest, that whisper is often drowned by noise: our plans, our anxieties, our self-promotion. We long for G-d to shout, but He seems committed to gentle speech. Apparently, heaven prefers to be heard rather than forced upon us.

Long before Moses and the Tabernacle, another man heard a call: “Go from your country… to the land I will show you.” That “Go” (Lech-Lecha) is the seed of Vayikra. Abraham didn’t find G-d; G-d found him, and history bent around that encounter. Through Abraham, a people was called not for privilege but for purpose: to bless all families of the earth. Their survival through exiles, empires, and inquisitions defies every statistical chart. Chance would have erased them; destiny preserved them. And here is where we gentiles stumble upon our own small aleph. Paul says we have been grafted into that same olive tree, not as replacements but as participants in the same calling. The story of Israel is not someone else’s history; it is the backbone of ours. To speak of Vayikra is therefore to speak of a shared vocation, Jew and gentile alike summoned to reflect the character of the King whose kingdom Yeshua described when He taught us to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The call has always been global, the aleph always small.

If you view history through the lens of Vayikar – “it just happened” – then Israel’s existence is a fluke, and your own faith a neurological accident. But if you read history through Vayikra, you begin to see a pattern of divine handwriting, patient and persistent. Leviticus itself begins with Vayikra and ends with the word keri קֶרִי, meaning “happenstance,” “accident,” or “indifference.” The word appears several times in Leviticus 26, describing a people who walk “with Me in keri,” that is, treating G-d’s providence as coincidence. It is the very opposite of covenantal awareness.

The book, therefore, is framed by the tension between Vayikra and keri, destiny and chance. So is your life. From one angle, the Cross looked like the ultimate accident – a failed messiah executed by empire. From another, it was the centre of redemption, the hinge on which eternity turned. The same event, two readings. What separates them is faith’s capacity to hear purpose in pain.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in Leviticus: The Book of Holiness (pp. 57–60), observed that Israel’s holiness had two faces: the priestly and the prophetic. The priest sanctifies time through rhythm and ritual; the prophet sanctifies history through justice and mercy. Leviticus, the priestly book, exists to remind us that sacred order matters. But it is framed by stories of history – Exodus before it, Numbers after it – as if Scripture were saying, “Worship must spill into the world.” Ritual without righteousness becomes theatre; activism without reverence becomes noise. Both have their purpose, and both are needed. The same holds for the followers of Yeshua. We live in sacred time through prayer and communion, yet we walk through sacred history in our boardrooms, classrooms, and bus stops – places where the kingdom can be embodied. When worship and witness embrace, we hear again the echo of Vayikra.

Now comes the uncomfortable part. If the aleph is small, then listening must be large. Our age is addicted to volume: the louder the opinion, the truer it must be. Silence, on the other hand, feels like failure. But G-d still prefers whispers. He meets Mary Magdalene in a garden with a single word, “Mary.” He walks unrecognised with two disciples until the breaking of bread. He breathes peace rather than delivering a sermon. Every scene of resurrection is quiet, as if the Creator were allergic to spectacle. Maybe holiness still enters the world that way: through unnoticed acts of obedience, through prayers nobody tweets, through faithfulness that never makes the news. The kingdom of heaven does not trend; it grows. To live Vayikra is to believe that no moment is meaningless, that washing dishes, writing essays, or comforting a friend can all become expressions of G-d if done in response to the call.

And so the question returns: are you called, or are you coincidental? If life is Vayikar (וַיִּקָּר), everything is chance. Morality dissolves into subjectivity, and the line between right and wrong becomes a matter of personal opinion. Suffering loses its meaning, becoming merely a detour in a universe without direction. The world turns into noise — disconnected sounds of human wills colliding, without melody or conductor. Existence becomes a fragmented narrative, written by no one and destined to be forgotten. But if life is Vayikra (וַיִּקְרָא), everything gains direction. Morality ceases to be a personal choice and begins to reflect the moral order of the Creator Himself. Suffering ceases to be punishment or absurdity and becomes a path toward purpose. Life ceases to be noise and becomes symphony — every note, even the dissonant ones, part of a greater harmony that only the Divine Maestro can fully comprehend. To live Vayikar is to drift with the tide of chance; to live Vayikra is to respond to the call. One lives by impulse, the other by purpose. One seeks momentary pleasure, the other eternal meaning.

Sacks concluded that the first word of Leviticus defines the destiny of Israel – “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” But the same sentence defines us all. To follow Yeshua is to hear that priestly call extended to the nations: not to replace Israel but to join the symphony of holiness that began with Abraham. To live by Vayikra is to stand where eternity meets Tuesday morning, to let heaven’s grammar shape your schedule. Every act of faith is a small aleph written into the world – humble, easily missed, yet indispensable to the sentence of redemption. History, then, is not accidental but a manuscript of divine patience. Each life is a line in that story, each prayer a syllable, each act of kindness a comma in the sentence of G-d’s mercy. So we return to the same question Moses faced, pen trembling above the parchment:

Will you write Vayikra וַיִּקְרָא or Vayikar וַיִּקָּר over your life?

Will you live as someone called, or as someone who merely happened? The small aleph waits, quiet, stubborn, holy, for your answer.

Adivalter Sfalsin

Footnotes

1. Leviticus 1:1 – “And He called (וַיִּקְרָא) to Moses, and the LORD spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying…”

2. Numbers 23:4, 16 – “And God happened upon (וַיִּקָּר) Balaam, and he said to Him, ‘I have prepared the seven altars…’”

3. Leviticus 26:21, 23–24, 27–28 – “If you walk with Me with keri (קֶרִי), I also will walk with you with keri,” meaning indifference or happenstance; G-d responds measure for measure to those who treat His providence as coincidence.

4. Exodus 19:6 – Israel’s vocation described as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

5. Romans 11:17–18 – Paul’s image of gentiles grafted into Israel’s olive tree.